IN the middle of 1952, the great American composer Samuel Barber enjoyed an idyllic holiday in Glenveagh Castle, Co Donegal. Like Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, and Clark Gable at different times, he was the guest there of Philadelphia art collector and philanthropist Henry Plumer McIlhenny, the castle’s last private owner, who spent his summers in Ireland and kept an open house.
The genial host allocated the composer his own tower in the castle where, surrounded by the “ineffable perfume” of turf fires, he could work undisturbed on his then current project: a ballet score. But when Barber wasn’t working, he surrendered himself to the “candlelight . . . and peat and Gaelic twilight”. The twilight was especially seductive, as he later wrote to his uncle: “I sank rather easily into [it] and began to read a lot of Yeats again.”
Moved by the latter experience, Barber stopped off en route to Dublin to visit the poet’s grave. “It was dusk and there was one farmer pausing in the field, leaning over a fence and smoking while he stared over the graves towards Ben Bulben and over the fields where Yeats had so often walked as a child. Silence. On the stone [the name] WB Yeats, the dates, and these words: “Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman: ride on.” Well, the composer was nearly right about the words, which he was quoting from memory. But what seems to have made a deeper impression on his visit to Drumcliff was discovering that, in death, the poet was surrounded by members of an extended (although equally dead) Barber family.
With his trademark dry wit, the American visitor thought that, compared with the reserve of Yeats’s epitaph, there was something a little smug about how his own Irish namesakes proclaimed themselves “safe in the arms of Jesus”. Even so, he was clearly delighted at a coincidence that confirmed his ancestral and emotional links with Ireland, and especially with its writers.
Already he had set lyrics by James Joyce and James Stephens to music. And after his Glenveagh sojourn, he began work on Hermit Songs: based on notes written in the margins of ancient manuscript by monks and scholars, and "perhaps not always meant to be seen by their Father Superiors". Including Church Bell at Night, At Saint Patrick's Purgatory, and The Monk and His Cat. The songs are among his finest.
A century after his birth, however, Barber is still best known for a rather different piece of music: Adagio for Strings. Many people who have never heard of him will be familiar with its profoundly mournful air, which has been used on such films as Platoonand The Elephant Man. It was also played at Albert Einstein's funeral. And when the BBC needed a soundtrack for a collage of stills from 9/11, the adagio again fitted the bill. The result has since amassed two-and-a-half million views on YouTube.
Described by one admirer as "a maverick romantic lyricist in a turbulent age", Barber was not always fashionable with critics. He was however, hugely successful: ranking with Gershwin and Copland in a trinity of the most famous 20th-century US composers. The biggest – perhaps the only – setback of a glittering career was his 1966 opera Antony and Cleopatra, an ill-fated collaboration with film-maker Franco Zeffirelli.
Its savaging by reviewers, combined with the break-up of his long-time relationship with Gian Carlo Menotti, probably contributed to the depression that benighted Barber’s later years, until he died in 1981.
The composer’s only visit to Dublin, 30 years beforehand, was not an especially happy experience. He was upset by the public indifference to Yeats and Joyce, thought the city “strangely dead”, and was glad to leave. Even so, Dublin will be the focus of his centenary celebrations in Ireland, with a series of events taking place there next week.
The centrepiece is on Tuesday – the actual 100th anniversary – with Samuel Barber: Echoes of Irelandat the National Concert Hall, featuring star US soprano Roberta Alexander and baritone Brian Mulligan, accompanied by pianist Lilia Boyadjieva and the RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet.
A second concert, on March 12th at the same venue, will focus on Barber’s piano works. And preceding each will be a talk by his biographer, New York music historian Barbara Heyman, who will also give a public lecture at the Royal Irish Academy of Music on Wednesday. Any profits from the concerts, over and above the artists’ fees, will go to the children’s charity, Barnardo’s. More details are at www.nota.ie.
Incidentally, this year also marks the centenary of the aforementioned Henry McIlhenny, who was born 100 years ago next October.
An interesting individual in his own right, McIlhenny was once described by Andy Warhol as the only person of “glamour” in Philadelphia. But his greatest legacy from an Irish perspective is that, in the early 1980s, he donated his Donegal castle and gardens to the State, having earlier sold it the lands. He died in 1986 and his former estate is now better known as Glenveagh National Park.